Wednesday, September 24, 2008

The Secret Lives of Hasidims

I'm straying away from politics today to offer another newspaper translation. I read the column a few days ago and promised myself to translate and post it, but the rare sight of a hasidim jew enjoying Monday Night Football in a sports bar on St.Laurent street convinced me to get on it ASAP.

Rima Elkouri is a La Presse reporter and columnist. She writes a lot about city life and the various cultural communities and minorities one will find in Montreal. I always loved her stories and topics.

I also have an insatiable curiosity for hasidic jews that goes back to my teenage years in the suburb of Boisbriand, where an important isolated community of hasidims live. I previously wrote a post referencing them.

Here's my translation of her very interesting paper on a "hasidic superwoman."

Rita is a woman as strong as she his private, who raises her seven children in the Mile-End. But we could have the impression that it's on another planet. Rita is a hasidic jew, and she respects to the letter the precepts of her religious movement. This does not stop her from having opinions on life, on the world. With one week to go before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, our journalist visited her on her balcony.

"It's okay with you if we sit on the balcony?"

"It's perfect."

Rita is my hasidic jew neighbour, well, almost. We are neighbours without actually be. Even if I see her almost every day on her balcony, even if we walk the same sidewalks, her universe is for the most part alien to mine. Our lives are skimming on each other without really touching.

On a summer night, while she was sitting on the balcony with her daughters, I introduced myself to my neighbour and asked if she would accept to open her door to me. Her immediate neighbour, who has known her for a long time, had already probed the terrain for me. Rita had a shy smile. I felt that she was too polite to say no, too modest to say yes. She first said she was not the kind to spread her life on the public place. But after a few hesitations, the mother of seven finally decided to meet me. "Come back in two weeks", she said, explaining that her daughter would be giving birth within the next few days and that she would be too busy to receive me during that period.

That's how I ended up in front of Rita's door on a Monday morning. I was a few steps away from my home. Yet, I felt like I was at a foreign country's border. In the land of "sirs with round hats", as observed on a saturday morning by my 4-years-old son while seeing a hasidic man wearing his traditional sabbath fur hat. A secret country that issues very few visas to foreign tourists.

I rang. It's the 7-years-old son that opened the door. In his "Sunday best", wearing the kippah, his payots neatly smoothed. I asked to speak with his mother. "One moment", he said. The house was busy. A teenager with long red hair came back to talk to me. "It's the baby's circumcision today, she said in a low voice, in english. Mom is asking if you can come back Tuesday or Wednesday."

I said I would come back. "I wish you a good day", politely said the young girl before closing the door.

The next day, I had an appointment with Rita at 2:30PM. She appeared on her balcony wearing a navy blue tunic with blue and pink stripes. She was wearing opaque stockings and a gray headband. A make-up free face, glasses sitting on the nose. She unfolded two chairs.

Inside the house, the newly circumcised newborn was crying. "Is it because of the circumcision?"

"No! said Rita with the reassuring tone of a grand-mother that has seen a lot. It's a baby that was already crying a lot before. But he has been affected for sure. He will get over it!"

An elderly man, black hat and white beard, exits the house while saluting Rita. "It's the rabbi that did the circumcision. He came to make sure everything was alright."

Hasidic Superwoman

I spent two afternoons on Rita's balcony talking circumcision and breastfeeding, man-woman relations and hasidic marriages, of the contrast between her community and the society surrounding it, the silence of the ones and the curiosity of the others, of good and less good neighbourood, of tensions and temptations.

While talking, Rita appeared as a pragmatic woman, a strong character, who is not afraid to voice her opinions. A mother hen and a watchful neighbour that knows all the neighbourhood gossip. A kind of superwoman as we see more and more in the hasidic community, reconciling work and big family. Conservative to the nails, yes, of course, but on many levels more open and respectful than I first thought. A secret woman, also. Rita's name is not Rita. It was out of question to talk about all these subjects while revealing her name to the public. I could have insisted. But I was afraid I would lose my visa.

Rita is 43-years-old. She is the mother of seven children, but in fact, she had eight. One of her firstborn twins died when she was 5 of a chronic lung disease. "She had her last sigh sitting on my knees, she says, the voice strangled by emotions. Sixteen years later, the wound still hurts. She suffered so much that I tell myself that she's better now. This is my consolation", she says in a low voice.

Children are Rita's whole life. Her firstborn, already married, is 21-years-old. The youngest one is 3-years-old. Between the two, there is a 20-years-old daughter, also married, 14-years-old twins (a boy and a girl) and two other sons, aged 11 and 7. "They bring me so much happiness. When I hold my 11-days-old grand-kid, it just makes me want more" she says, moved.

She recalls, laughing, that time when she was transporting her kids in her triple stroller that she called her "tchoo-tchoo-train", non-jewish neighbours stopped her to say: "You know we admire you?" Why? she wondered. For Rita, there's nothing more natural than having a children swarm around her. "Is there any other way to live?"

Respect the Other's Culture

Born in Israel, Rita landed in Montreal while she was very young. She always lived in the Mile-End. Her mother was from Romania, her father, from Poland, both were Holocaust survivors. She teaches yiddish and religion. Her husband too. "For me, the two only options were either to work as a secretary for a religious person or to teach. It was the only way to respect the Jewish calendar."

There was a time where it was almost impossible for a majority of hasidic jews to pursue college or university studies. Because in an inward-looking community where man and woman live parallel lives, mixing sexes is not encouraged. But since 1985, upon a request by the Ministry of Education, Marie-Victorin Cégep administers college level programs offered in Montreal jewish schools. That's how Rita's older daughters both got a college degree as youth education technicians without ever stepping in a real Cégep.

Even if non-jews always talk to her in english, Rita speaks french well. "Before, I was shy to speak french. I can't say that I master the past perfect! But I tell myself: 'We live in Quebec. We want to be respected. If I want my culture to be respected, I must respect the culture of others.'"

Love Behind Closed Doors

I talked for a while with Rita of what she refers as the "invisible border" betweenher community and the rest of society. On both sides of this border, there is a lot of misunderstanding. She remembers a conversation she had with a man who addressed her in the bus. He started talking about the Outremont hasidims, about the fact that they buy more and more houses in the neighbourhood. Rita answered that houses were for sale for everybody and that, if people didn't want to sell them, they didn't have to. The man kept going, saying his hasidic neighbours were not saluting him, she tells. "Did you try to salute them? asked Rita, who has a personal rule to say hello to everyone that wants to salute her, jews or not

That said, it's important to know that, inside the community itself, there is strict rules regarding the conduct between men and women. You can't salute anybody, anywhere. "Men can't socialize with women that are not in their immediate families. Myself, if I meet my son-in-law, I can't say hello. It's a question of modesty.

Even between husband and wife, modesty is required. You can't show emotions. You can't hold hands on the sidewalk. Let's not talk about kissing in public. "Love is lived behind closed doors. There's even couples that won't sit on the same couch if their kids are there.Keeping Children Away from Temptations

The cocoon voluntarily created by hasidic jews is linked to their need to perpetuate an heritage which rules are numerous and rigid, says Rita. "To keep children away from temptations, it must be that way. It has all to do with our beliefs. It's not because there is something negative with the others.

What are those "temptations" she refers to, by the way? It goes from consuming pork or non-kosher food to premarital sex. "It's so common that we have no choice but to protect our children, says Rita. My 11-years-old son saw his two sisters become pregnant. He doesn't know how they became pregnant, but he knows it happens right after being married."

Rita tells me how embarassed she was when her children heard a man on the street refer to the mother of his children as his girlfriend. "They asked me a ton of questions. I told them he just called her that way..."

At the same time, she makes sure to explain to her kids that rules that apply to hasidims do not apply to all. "When my children ask me why the neighbour drives his car on a Saturday, I explain that the neighbour was not born jewish and that he's allowed to drive his car on sabbath."

Despite everything, Rita has always allowed her children to play with the neighbours. The electric car that she won in a contest, every little kid that wanted, jewish or not, was allowed to try it and push the invisible border a little further.

The worst, according to Rita, would be to have a kid that would turn his back on the community. There's more and more, she says. "For their parents, it's worse than if they were dead."

TV Forbidden

To maintain the cocoon undisturbed, it's impossible for the majority of hasidim to be exposed to TV, radio or internet. You never listen to the news, then? "People that want to listen to the news do it in their car."

It's also out of question to risk eating non-kosher food at the neighbours' place, as sympathetic as they seem to be. "Even if we are served only fruits, if those fruits have been cut with a knife that was used to cut pork, we have a problem."

What kind of problem? What happens to someone that eats a non-kosher fruit? A rational question in an universe that is not. "We are born in this tradition and we believe it, simply. If it happens, there is a terrible feeling of guilt. We tell ourselves that we were not cautious enough. We feel that our soul has been spoiled and that we will need to atone our fault. If not, we'll be punished. And if you sin voluntarily, there is hell."

How does Rita see the future of her expanding community in a society that looks so different? Even if she is conscious that tensions exist, Rita believes in peaceful cohabitation. Live and let live. It's out of question to impose hasidic rules to society, she says. But it's out of question to abandon her heritage. Hence the invisible border, that intrigue some and irritate others. It doesn't mean that we can't talk. "I wish that people would ask me more questions!"

We can talk. We must talk. But we can't be friends? I asked Rita, while guessing the answer. She looked puzzled. Then, philosophically, she answered while looking in my eyes: "If there is 26 rocks in front of us and that there is 25 on which we can't walk, how can we do it? There is too many differences in our respective lifestyles. And who can say: I am strong enough to resist temptations?"

I left Rita with her cauldrons and her kids protected against "temptations". I went back on the other side of the border, a little less ignorant but as curious. I will need more than one visa to discover the secret of my hasidic neighbours.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Canadian Columnist Pisses Off the American Right, Fox News Leads the Charge

The Alaskan who went 'outside'Heather MallickI was born in a northern Canadian settlement so small it was accessible most of the year only by a Bombardier, a sort of huge military tank built for passengers. It was like a transport plane, a big iron bulb with caterpillar tracks. I swear we had a paddle-steamer for supplies in the summer.

Take that, Sarah Palin. The place was six times smaller than Wasilla, Alaska, the town that birthed John McCain's strange vice-presidential "soulmate", as weird as that disconnected eerie smile that floats on his face as he stands next to her.

My credentials are solid; Palin cannot out-hick me. Until I fled at 18, I never lived in a northern town of more than 12,000 people. My towns were full of Sarah Palins. These types are fine, such as they are, until they leave town and turn fraudulent. They label themselves "the salt of the earth". It's when they try to make that a qualification for a greater glory that things turn unpleasant.

I never claimed a higher moral standing for coming from a great big empty on the map. Small towns are places that smart people escape from, for privacy, for variety, for intellect, for survival. Palin should have stayed home.

Canada has lots of hockey moms. They're called Fran and Nancy. They have cruel haircuts and their voices shake the rafters of the rink as their rink-rats play. How can I translate the hearty, jollying-along Palin for British audiences? She's a working class Joan Hunter Dunn. It's those volleyball shoulders and field-hockey thighs, the energy, the bullying, and the utter self-confidence in every lie she tells.

Did she really joke, "You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick."?

Did she just blow kisses to the audience?

Did she just say, "We need to produce more of our own oil and gas. Take it from a gal who knows the North Slope. We've got lots of both."?

Yes, she did lie about billion-gallon slurps of oil and gas available for Americans to blow, about her support of Alaska's notorious pork-barrel "bridge to nowhere", about which particular citizens will see tax increases under Obama (only the richest, and she knows that).

She also lied when she slobbered over small-town folks (an American version of British farm life, except British farmers have a point). The granite honesty of hicks is a cliche, a fantasy, a meme of American life, as much as the working-class solidarity of Tony Blair was in 1997, and where did that get anyone?

But most of all, she lied about the north and the virtues it supposedly confers on citizens. Canadians watch this with horror. To us, Alaska is the back of beyond. Americans feel the same way. Alaskans are a bunch of Ted Stevens, that enraged screaming old senator who explained that the internet was not a big truck, it was more like a "bunch of tubes". He was arrested and charged with taking bribes, but handily won the August senatorial primary.

We love our own north to the point of covering our eyes and humming as it melts (yesterday the BBC headlined the collapse of Canada's ice shelves; Canadian papers and websites missed the story) but Alaska is different from our north. We share a 1,500-mile border with a frontier state full of drunks and crazy people, of the blight that cheap-built structures bring to a glorious landscape. Canadian firms invest billions in the place and mine its ores. One hundred thousand Canadians visit Alaska every year, and we like to pass by in cruise ships. But it never goes further than that. Alaska is our redneck cousin, our Yukon territory forms a blessed buffer zone, and thank God he never visits. Alaska is the end of the line.

Palin got her first passport last year. (Americans didn't need a passport to enter Canada until recently). She seems to have visited us precisely once, not surprisingly since Alaskans regularly refer to the rest of the world as "outside". We are so foreign to her, this woman who might become US president.

What is native to her is smugness, her certainty that what's good for Wasilla is good for the world in all its infinite variety. It's a variety that Palin will never begin to grasp.

Since it was released in the US, she was subjected to various death threats and message boards were flooded with reactions, insults and the usual and repetitive anti-Canadian ramblings, which are sometimes funny.

Let's agree she went too far, and there's a fair share of "redneckness" on the Canadian side of the border, but the core of the subject remains; Palin is not "presidential", vice or not.

Also, the right has to stop using the small-town values as a symbol of virtue. Small towns are fled by people who can't share the town's "core" values because they would never fit in, being marginalized for being different.

It's not that the values themselves are fundamentally wrong, just that the population is smaller, the jobs variety more limited, hence limiting the diversity of lifestyles, and, by extension of point-of-views and values. Therefore, ending with a more uniformed, one size-fits-all set of values, it kicks the "odd ones" to the "wicked life" of the cities, where sheer population size and actual diversity in lifestyles, jobs and origins will allow people to find others that share their views and interests.

There's nothing basically wrong with city virtues, the same way there's nothing basically wrong with small town ones, but neither can pretend to any actual form of moral high ground. People will be people, no matter where they are from, no matter where they fit best, for better or for worse.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Politicunts: Canadian Elections, Part III

This video, titled Culture en Péril (Culture in Danger) was created by a few Québec artists and posted on YouTube to denounce the cuts in cultural funding by the Conservative governement, led by Stephen Harper.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Canada Votes: Youth's Voices, Part I

I asked a bunch of friends and aquaintances about their views, thoughts, worries and opinions on the current Canadian election.

Here's a sample of what they told me (comments in french were translated in english, with the original text in parentheses):

"I am only scared of one thing; a Harper/Conservative majority government. Where I live a conservative or liberal is going to win. Consequently, I am more likely to help stop a conservative majority if i vote liberal. I probably will vote liberal dispite the fact that I usually vote NDP or Green party. It looks like the liberals are doing poorly though so it might be another few years of unbridled right wing agenda served with fake smiles and bad sweaters."-DanI'm sorry, but I'll sound like a little rebellious punk: Politics suck, because it's administerd by technocrats anyways...Better to work heart to heart!(J'suis desolée, mais j'vais avoir l'air dune p'tite punk revoltée: La politique c'est d'la marde , parce que, d'une manière ou d'une autre, c'est géré par la technocratie...better to work heart to heart)-Catherine

I think people need to look passed the messenger and see what the message really is...who cares if Dion can't relate intimately with people, he is a brilliant man, with good ideas. Harper scares the hell out of me, and has some really dubious plans for Canada, and Canada's role in the world. Also, allowing May into the debates was the right thing to do...it should not been seen as a favour to anyone, but the RIGHT thing to do.-JesseIt's shit, one or the other, it ends up the same(C'est de la mardeun ou l'autre c'est du pareil au même)-Yannick

Cynical, the kids? Let's not jump to conclusions, it's a small sample, but it's interesting. Please, keep the emails coming!

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Did You Say Irónico?

A nice find by my friend Sam:

The text says:

City of BarcelonaGuarded area in a radius of 500 meters.Place George Orwell

George Orwell being, of course, the author of the dystopian novel 1984, which is set in a world where every action done (mostly by a party member) is monitored by cameras, the police, or your own children...

Politicunts: American Elections, Part I

I really like McCain. His hypocrisy, lies and dirty campaign gives a lot of material for dumb blogs like mine.

And the great thing, I don't even have to modify a iota of what he says to make it outrageous.

But Richard Hétu, a french-canadian journalist who is LaPresse special correspondent in New York always have interesting tidbits on the US presidential campaign on his newspaper's blog. Here's a video debunking some "facts" stated in various McCain ads:

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Politicunts: Canadian Elections, Part II

Continuation of my new series on election coverage, Politicunt. Which, "honours" already obnoxious/stupid/indecent political comments and articles. (The original articles are available by clicking on the title links). The second edition covers the upcoming Canadian election.

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper offered a rare apology to his rival Stéphane Dion on Tuesday for an online campaign attack ad that featured a bird defecating on the Liberal leader, which Harper called "tasteless and inappropriate, yet hilarious."

The ad appeared to deflect attention from the Liberals' Tuesday launch of a website aimed at revamping the image of their, at times, bookish leader, where he is shown reacting to the Two Girls One Cup video.

The Tory web page, which was active until Tuesday morning, featured an image of "Professor" Dion at a school blackboard, followed by puffin flying over his head and dropping excrement on Dion's shoulder.

The puffin was mentioned last year by then-leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff as a potential mascot for the Liberal party because the "noble" birds "hide their excrement", in what many took as an awkward reference to the sponsorship scandal.

After selecting Dion, the Liberals instead chose the ostrich as their mascot.

When asked about the site, Harper said he had seen it late last night after receiving an email from a friend, but had been assured by his national campaign manager that it was promptly taken down from the party website and uploaded on youtube.com and funnyordie.com

"We're shitting enough on the Liberals without getting into that kind of thing. Bestiality is not a conservative value. Let's keep it to a human level!" Harper told reporters at a campaign event in Winnipeg.

The Tories said the bird was created by an overactive web designer and not noticed by his parents. While the puffin is still flying on the site, it is no longer defecating on Dion, who said he accepted Harper's apology.

"He went far too far today and he had to apologize," Dion told reporters outside his campaign bus during an unscheduled stop in Napanee, Ont., to empty the bus' septic tank

"I accept the apology, but this is the topping of the turd when it comes to their decade-long "shitting-on-liberals" campaign." he said.

For her part, Green Party leader Elizabeth May called the puffin ad a reminder of the importance of guano in some ecosystems and said she hoped Canadians would remember her.

"Well, here's a story where our party can actually get involved in the debate, well not THE debate per se, but I mean the race, and yet talk about our platform. I think it's the first time it happens in a media other than our website. By the way, we've got fifty hits yesterday! I was checking the stats while rewriting some HTML codes and I was so pleasantly surprised!"

Politicunts: Canadian Elections, Part I

Here's my new series on election coverage, Politicunt. Which, "honours" already obnoxious/stupid/indecent political comments and articles. (The original articles are available by clicking on the title links). The first edition covers the upcoming Canadian election.

A Taliban spokesman says he's well aware of Canada's looming election and he supports whichever party is more likely to pull Canadian troops out of Afghanistan, "even the damn Bloc!"

Encountered at Kandahar's Tim Hortons, where he was enjoying a double-double and a bagel, Qari Muhammad Yussef says the fact they weren't included in the debate is why insurgents have stepped up attacks on Canadians in Afghanistan.

"We were hopeful the Greens would get in. Because you know, if the Greens are in, everybody's in!"

While he doesn't know which party is most likely to withdraw Canadian troops from Afghanistan, the spokesman says such a platform will be "good for that party and for their nation and for the Canadian people, but mostly for the soldiers, as they'll kinda stop dying."

He says he's familiar with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, stating that the Talibans "are really disappointed and disillusioned that Mr. Harper has taken a party whose roots were in grassroots democracy and populism and turned it on its head into a top-down control machine that wants to run over everyone", but isn't sure about the other candidates or parties vying for the country's top job.

"I think there's an important issue in the fact that the left is divided, but the right is united. That, and the fact that regionalism prevails, some provinces are marginalized and the federal government seems to have no real power over some tribal areas."

As for the impending U.S. election, Yussef says he doesn't care much for American politics and believes the next president, regardless of who is chosen, will be just as Christian as the current one.

"When it comes to influence, the US are not what we'd call, a "major power". Obama would be decent, I've learned recently on Fox News that he was somehow related to Osama Bin Laden AND Saddam Hussein, which is pretty neat, despite being a little surprising, but he's definitely not experienced enough to deal with core American issues that are so important to the middle-class crusader."

Woah, I Missed the Blogosphere, But Mostly, the Blogosphere Missed Me...Right?

Wrong.

Couldn't care less (I was talking about myself, but hey, guess it works for you as well, sole reader, if you exist) but I'm back nevertheless.

Why?

Well, first because I'm actually back from the bush, which was especially tight this year. And after a few weeks of complete rest (and waking up around 4PM in average), I feel relaxed enough to be completely useless in my productivity (Let's admit that writing an unread blog is not the summum of efficiency. Yet, it's a step up from total procrastination).

But secondly, and mostly, because there's a SHITLOAD of elections around! First here in Canada, where it will be (thankfully) as short as it is bland, and then in the US, where it is as spectacular as it is dualistic and shameful (as everything else down there...yeah, you can quote me on that, for now)

Then, how about politics? Well, here's how it goes: I'm planning to translate as many french-canadian blogs as possible on the US and Canadian elections, change my mind dozens of times as I read through various analysis(or is it analasyses, analysii?), blog about it, edit, then remove posts, and finally let my brother convince me that I was wrong all along because he's in University and, better yet, he's an original who'd never get influenced by teachers and the medias.

Sounds good? I mean, until I leave for Central America (quite soon, actually), I have nothing better to do...

Alright, deal! But, I don't feel like writing tonight, it's quite late and I'd rather browse the web to find some free porn that "does" it, which takes increasingly longer, which means I'll probably end up on facebook, using my imagination while stalking pics of friends of a friend...

Wish me luck!

Time to go facefuck! (Damn, I even disturbed myself with that one!)

P.S: No, I'm not intoxicated.P.P.S: I'm aware some old photo links are broken, due to my cuntastically (my new word of the day, I love it since I learned that cunt is even badder than fuck!) fucktarded image server, maj.com, who decided to become majhost.com just to piss us all over again. Too bad they didn't improve anything on the 1999-ish, fast, user-friendly interface!)